CloudBees Makes PaaS More Palatable in the Enterprise

One of the major challenges with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is simply finding a way to actually bring what amounts to a new paradigm for building and managing applications into the enterprise. Most of the providers of PaaS have a fairly regimented approach to application development that enterprise IT organizations are supposed to adopt.

There’s no doubt that most of those methodologies have been cobbled together using best-in-class practices that in the fullness of time will be the direction that most enterprise customers will move in. In the meantime, they need an approach to PaaS that adapts more readily to how they go about developing applications today.

In recognition of that simple reality, CloudBees this week unfurled ClickStacks, which lets organizations customize CloudBees runtimes and compose new ones, or modify ones provided by CloudBees. In addition, CloudBees has rolled out ClickStart, which provides the ability to provision and deploy those applications using a single click.

Designed to support languages written in Java, Spring, Scala, Clojure, Sencha Touch, Play2, Hibernate, Lift, JAX-RS, Backbone.js or Grails, CloudBees CEO Sascha Labourey says monolithic approaches to PaaS simply aren’t going to be accepted inside most IT organizations. Over time, an enterprise IT organization may change its existing methodologies as they get more comfortable with PaaS. But initially the onus for making PaaS easier to consume should fall squarely on the PaaS provider, says Labourey.

In essence, CloudBees is allowing IT organizations to create their own custom containers in the cloud. Without such a capability there’s simply too much organization inertia to overcome, which is one of the primary reasons that the shift to PaaS in the enterprise has been fairly slow. The shift to PaaS will no doubt eventually occur. But before that happens, PaaS providers are going to have to find a way to deal with enterprise IT organizations pretty much as they are, rather than how they want them to be.